Let's take your Nazi example a bit further. We could say there's nothing inherantly wrong with Jews wearing large yellow stars on their outer clothing—as long as it was their choice. And ultimately that's true. Except that Jews would have never chosen to wear bright yellow stars on their outer clothing. It was forced on them by an oppressive government.

There is zero indication that Muslim women would have come up with this restrictive clothing choice on their own, though enough doctrination has gone on that women brought up in it are fiding ways of defending it (and largely because it's been presented to them as an intrinsic part of their religion, which it is not). The example of women who might wear the clothing as a Halloween joke doesn't count, because the very use of the clothes as a joke demonstrates they would never do just a thing seriously.

The trouble with your Nazi youth analogy is that Nazism, as opposed to persecution by Nazism, is a choice. Therefore I'm not surprised that a very small minority of people still gravitate towards it and choose to emulate the look as part of their affiliation. That's very different than mimicking the forced styles of a victim. The only group I know who have considered it are gays, but the pink triangle is still fairly rare, and it's an attempt to remind people of a forgotten oppression, not to agree with the Nazis that they should be tagged and identified.

And while BDSM participants do wear binding/restrictive costumes as part of a sexual encounter, they rarely, if ever, such outfits to work or in other social situations, unless its a specific BDSM gathering.

The big issue with all your examples, whether the dress be for humor, BDSM, or simple genuine approval, is that these are all extremely rare instances, and don't really tally with the conditions Muslim women are forced to live under.

I like what other posters have said about Wolf's ridiculous veil/miniskirt analogy. What particularly bothers me is that not only is it a poor analogy, but it sidesteps another more rational analogy that would tell us something about choice. Theoretically, a woman in America can decide to wear only dresses, not pants which "belong to men." And such a woman can choose to wear only dresses that reach the ankle and a blouse that does not reveal the figure. The fact is, no woman in America does. And that seems to be because, given the choice, women don't want to be restriced to glothes by gender and because they don't see their bodies as something best to hide in order to be taken seriously in the world. I suspect Muslim women would reach the same conclusion.

Chesler is horrified by Wolf's argument and doesn't pull any punches in a blog response titled "The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?" It bears the taunting subhead: "Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy."

The misleading title with the "sexy" inaccurate subhead is par for the course around here. As is the willful misrepresentation of an idea the writer disagrees with.

But in terms of the larger picture, Cheler is right and Wolf wrong because the dress Muslim women wear in public is an outgrowth of the (modern) fundamentalist movement, is not a long-standing Muslim tradition, and is being forced on women as a way to control them and maintain a male dominated space. I'm not at all suprised Wolf misses this. Nor am I suprised that the author of the (ludicrious, poorly researched, ideologically driven) The Beauty Myth thinks women might be more respected as individuals if dressed in a sackcloth.

Muslim women do a whole lot to make themselves look beatiful and feminine in the imposed garb. Flower patterns, different types of cloth, frills on their scarves. It's all they can do, but they do all they can. And such dress will clearly will cause the men they interact with to think of them as romatic/sexual creatures, and thus always have the issue of gender in mind, whether their curves show or not. Thus the argument Wolf is recounting sounds weak to me.

I appreciate your response. I read in the tone of the article the quality of an expose, which implies underhanded or unfair practices. And there aren't any.

As someone else pointed out, the large majority of Wiki posters are anonymous, so any accurate determining of gender participation is impossible.

And "It's a man's world" is a really loaded phrase. We know what that means, and what it means in current discourse is nothing good or fair or kind. Between the headline and the subtitle, I'd say it's more than just a little confrontational.

What gets me most about this, and Broadsheet in general, is the "us" vs. "them" dichotomy which never involves an examination of women's/the writer's shortcomings or lapses or simply differences. There's no examination of the self.

So what is your point? That men shoudln't demonstrate "an intense interest in detail and a high tolerance for debate"? That women should? That Wikipedia ought not to exist if those more likely to be drawn toward contributing to it are men rather than women?

And why oh why is the headline posing this as a conspiracy of some sort (the implication being sexist men are shutting women out) when in fact women are not in any way barred from participation and contributions are not deleted on the basis of gender?

Really, seriously, looking around at the daily Broadsheet articles, I can only conclude Salon is the most ass-backwards site on the web when it comes to feminism.